Ruth S. Waterman

Ruth S. Waterman is an American anesthesiologist, Chair of the Department of Anesthesiology at UC San Diego Health, Associate Clinical Professor at UC San Diego School of Medicine, and Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer of Commence Bio, a company that specializes in next generation stem cell therapy and cancer immunotherapy. Waterman is known for developing stem cell-based therapies to help patients with pain and advancing methods to personalize pain medicine based on pre-surgery genetic testing. To do this, her team developed the proprietary Stimulated Toll-like Receptor Technology (STaRT). STaRT programs MSCs to act in either an anti-tumor (MSC1) or anti-inflammatory (MSC2) capacity. The STaRT approach takes advantage of Toll-Like Receptors (TLR), a family of naturally occurring molecules that the body's innate immune system uses to sense and respond to invading microbes. STaRT stimulates TLR3 to generate MSC2 cells and TLR4 to generate MSC1 cells. The company has not yet produced any clinical stage products.